Changing Students’ Lives Forever
SRSD has been recognized in writing next as having the single largest effect of any researched approach to writing instruction. I dare you to not be just infected with how positive I am about SRSD. What fascinated me was how quickly the gains were made. English teachers were saying, “yeah, we’re seeing such a difference in students’ writing.” You’re not just learning to write when you’re writing to learn.
Story:
I’ll tell you about my favorite SRSD story. It’s about a young student who is in third grade, he’s learning disabled, and he came in and said, “I’m not doing this. I’m not going to write”. I left an assignment anyway, an opinion piece that I’d be submitting these essays to the Barnstable County courthouse competition knowing that, because of my particular population, I couldn’t guarantee that anybody would actually place.
Before the submission this little boy’s mother came in for a parent teacher conference and was flipping through his work and as she read it, she looked up and said, “this can’t be my son’s writing. Does this belong to someone else”? I told her, no, it was his. She just teared up. She couldn’t believe how much her son had developed. So much that she didn’t think that it was him.
And now the end of the story: to my surprise, this student won his category for opinion writing essays. I truly know it was because of a process that finally clicked for him and finally made the difference that he needed for his confidence and his ability to write. And this was the boy who wouldn’t write.
SRSD teaches students to be independent learners and own the process. The power of SRSD is in the self-regulation strategies and it really is what helps students become motivated. What we found is that as SRSD has the highest effect size of any writing intervention out there.
SRSD is scientifically based on 50 years of research and cognitive science and educational psychology. We also see what kids write. We see where they start, we see what they end. You show that to teachers is pretty obvious.
SRSD is scientifically proven to work in different situations, different risk groups, different ages, different countries, different cultures. Consistently, it makes a difference in how well students write.
My dream is to see what those students look like in 12th grade, to see what they can do in college, and what they can do on the job. To see what their attitudes and beliefs are about writing. Together, we will make a meaningful difference in the school experience.